


From A Distance

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Iron Man 3 Compliant, Post-Thor: The Dark World, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 05:50:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1458184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since the battle of New York, Clint's been watching from a distance...</p>
            </blockquote>





	From A Distance

**Author's Note:**

> This is my version of what in the world Clint and Bruce have been up to since The Avengers. Spoilers for all Phase 2 movies.

SHIELD moves fast. The Chitauri are barely on the ground when teams of agents start sweeping in alongside the grim-faced determined police officers and firefighters, and later, the rather shell-shocked National Guard. They don’t come for Clint yet; they have bigger fish to fry.

It’s not until Loki’s off of Earth a day and a half later (a day and a half of blessed, bizarre peace) that they haul Clint in for debriefing. He’s flying high on some marvelous painkillers to stave off the headaches he’s still having from getting his head rammed into a railing and then punched a few dozen times, so it doesn’t register right away that they take his word with only a minimal amount of questioning. There’s no badgering, no grilling, no microscopic third-degree dissection of every decision he made under Loki’s influence.

The agents just listen to his report as he lays it out in stark, pitiless clarity. He talks about his feeling for a couple of hours with a nice, unshockable SHIELD therapist named Lana. They shove him through a medical evaluation on one day, and the next he’s doing field retesting, comparing times on the obstacle course and range with his old times. Though the faint, distant throb of pain that the drugs can’t touch, he’s pleased to see he beat his last record.

A week after he shot Director Fury in the chest, they give him back his bow and his go bag and give him an assignment. He doesn’t even bother to argue.

He gets on a windowless cargo plane and they fly for hours, stopping to refuel three times. Clint’s half-convinced that at one of the stops they’re going to put a bullet in his head and dump him in a shallow grave. It’s the first reason he can come up with why they field-certified him so fast. He’s still pretty messed up; his dream suck and he’s really only able to sleep when the plane is flying, with enough background noise to drown out the insidious memories of the Tesseract’s whispers and Loki’s voice.

But when the bullet doesn’t come, he realizes something else is going on. This has the feel of a double-blind mission, where the pilot is only told where to go for the next leg, where Clint’s instructions end up appearing in a time-delayed communication of some sort.

Him on a mission. Hilarious.

At least he’d gotten to say something to Natasha before he’d gone. In the horrendous aftermath of the Chitauri attack, they’d walked the streets of New York together, hand-in-hand from the schwarma joint, looking at the goods of the street vendors who’d put their goods back out on display as soon as the dust settled. Resilient as cockroaches, humanity was.

He’d found a jewelry-seller and spied a little sparkly arrow on a silver chain. It cost him five bucks – half the usual price because the vendor recognized him as a hero. She would have given it to him for free, but Clint had his pride, and an inexplicable five-dollar bill that was still tucked in his vest from some previous mission.

“For you.” For thanks was what he meant. Natasha let him put it on her, then pulled him into a doorway and they kissed the daylights out of each other. That night, in one of Stark’s guest rooms (fuck if they were leaving Loki unguarded, any of them), that necklace had been the only thing between them. 

They’d had that. That was more than most got, and they both knew it. A few days later, body still aching from several beatdowns and an explosion, the plane finally descends for good.

The co-pilot produces a heavy envelope and opens it in Clint’s sight. He keeps one packet inside with his name on it, one for the other pilot, and gives Clint his. He reads fast – asset protection, Mombasa, Banner. He successfully resists the urge to laugh until he cries. 

The pilots leave him behind, and Clint takes a cab into town with the local currency that had been included. He wasn’t to use safehouses or contact anyone. They’d get in touch with him, not the other way around. There’s a handwritten number for a local forger to get papers. There’s also a handwritten coded message, in Fury’s handwriting, for another address in Johannesburg. He needs to be there in twenty-four hours.

Clint understands. No one will know where he, or Banner, is save Fury, not even the pilots that brought him here. He’s loose, detached, expected to fund himself and keep a low profile while keeping an eye on Banner and anyone who might take an interest in him. Clint sees better from a distance, and a distance is how Banner prefers it. Unless shit goes sideways, Bruce won’t even know he’s here. Clint should be able to ward off any trouble before it even finds the good doctor. It’s a real job, a real responsibility. 

It’s kindness with a bitter taste.

Part of this is on the level; no one is to interfere with Banner. Fury had wanted to keep some measure of what he’d probably told the man when he was brought in. Part of it is to keep any justifiably angry SHIELD agents from shooting Clint in the back or shoving him down a flight of stairs. If they’d kept him stateside for his mandatory recovery term, Clint might as well have invested in his own tombstone.

He hits up the forger, then gets another ride to a small local airport and finds an adventurous bush pilot. Clint doesn’t inquire as to the nature of the man’s cargo. Imri has already forgotten Clint’s face as soon as the cash hits his palm.

He touches down in Johannesburg after a journey best not remembered. Parts of Johannesburg are beautiful. Many parts are not. He finds Banner in the middle of the worst of it and does what he does best: he perches, nests, and watches. 

Banner tends to the poor and ailing with endless patience Clint can appreciate. He fumbles through the polyglot of tongues in use, but because he’s helping, the people are happy to teach. Clint converts what currency he has left to the local coin, and makes it last. He can live very simply when he wants to, and his only expensive hobby is his bow. He supplements his income by wagers of skill – darts in a pub. After he straightens out one or two guys who didn’t like being hustled (God _damn_ it was good to know he still had it), he pays for rounds for the house to make himself mildly acceptable. Within two months, Clint hustles the tourists and splits the proceeds with some locals who egg them on. It’s a good system, and he keeps from having too much cash on him by using the excess by buy supplies for Bruce, dropped off in strategic locations.

He gets to be a guardian angel instead of an angel of death. It’s a nice switch. It helps that the neighborhood’s loud enough to give him white noise while he sleeps to keep the bad dreams to a minimum. It also helps he has time to think.

He and Banner repeat the pattern through three more countries and one continent. If Bruce doesn’t know he’s being tailed, he’s an idiot, but perhaps he just does Clint the courtesy of never looking over his shoulder. It becomes a sort of routine, and Clint begins to feel a measure of healing in his battered soul.

\--

Six months in, Tony Stark dies. 

That’s the bad part about being off-book, you find out the news at the same time as the rest of the world. The explosions that had been happening around the world weren’t exactly commonplace, but they’ve become moreso with Chitauri tech loose out there and the rise of superheroes and supervillains making the old terrorist threats not scary enough. The Mandarin is one more bad guy taking credit; Clint’s seen a dozen of his sort come and go, he’s just bolder than the last one. So Clint only listens with half an ear, not because he didn’t care, but because he thought any one of a dozen agencies, or just the good ole’ U.S. Army, could take care of this clown.

Then it went from attacks in high-danger areas to downtown Hollywood.

The Mandarin blows up Tony’s house a few hours later. Clint finds his feet carrying him to the clinic where Bruce is this week, seeing Tony’s arrogant threat over and over again in his mind’s eye. It had been hubris, but Tony built himself on hubris. That Mandarin character had nearly killed one of Tony’s people in the Chinese Theater explosion – according to Natasha, Happy’s one of Tony’s oldest retainers and a friend. Clint knew Tony’s threat had been dangerous, but he knows why Tony had done it. It was the same reason a soldier provided covering fire to extract a wounded buddy from the battlefield. _Pick on **me** , leave them alone, focus on **me** you bastards._

Tony couldn’t stand to see his people hurt. And he thought he could take whatever the Mandarin could dish out. He was fucking Iron Man. Clint could see it in Tony’s eyes on the news; the man wasn’t in great shape. No sleep. Bad dreams when you did. God knew Clint saw the same look in the mirror often enough. He wasn’t the only one to have suffered in Loki’s attack.

The Mandarin had killed Tony for it.

Bruce looks up when Clint comes in, one look covering recognition, unsurprise, and sudden, sad understanding. He finishes his instruction to the young man he’s working on, and meets Clint, steering him into a dark, stinking alley.

“The Mandarin killed him. It was all over the news.” It’s the first words he’s exchanged to anyone who even knows of him in half a year.

Bruce just hangs his head, shoulders slumping. Both are practical enough to know the realities. Tony issued his threat on TV, and was dead three hours later. Unless either of them had been capable of teleporting, there wasn’t a fucking thing they could have done. Bruce looks up, and Clint can nearly read a few thoughts going through his head, same as Clint. Tony might have survived, the man was luckier than a litter of cats. Or not. SHIELD would take the Mandarin apart for this. Hopefully. Maybe, if they could. It didn’t seem like a lot of people cared nowadays. Steve and Natasha had probably been deployed elsewhere, looking for the Mandarin's base, and hell maybe Fury thought Tony could handle one madman. Of course, it only takes one slip, and then everything's gone.

“I’m glad it’s you out here,” Bruce says instead.

“You knew?”

“Figured there’s be _some_ one.”

“I need a beer,” Clint says fervently.

“I wouldn’t say no,” Bruce says easily.

They go to a watering hole where no one knows them and swap Tony stories as the beers come and go. Clint has a lot of funny ones via Natasha. Tragic ones too, but now is not the time. Bruce knows enough about Tony’s accomplishments to put them in context. Clint’s impressed; the man had been a literal genius, even in fields that weren’t his specialty. He wished he had a chance to exchange more than a dozen words with the man.

The next few days are no better. The Mandarin executes a man on live TV. Air Force One blows up and the President goes missing. You'd think someone would have pulled Captain America in to help with a little thing like that, but everyone's still looking for the Mandarin's base in the Middle East, doing what they should have done for Tony the first time and finding the snake's nest. Less than three hours after _that_ there’s _another_ fucking battle that they could have never made it in time for (in _Miami_ of all the places, so he'd forgive Natasha and Steve for not being there), the President is saved… and Tony’s not dead. 

Tony’s _not dead._

Clint doesn’t regret breaking cover. Bruce does have things under control, particularly when he’s not under the influence of alien magic. And he’s a better man than Clint could ever hope to be.

“But I appreciate the help,” Bruce says over what has become a nightly ritual of beers at a different place each night. He means the money and medical supplies, even more than the dogs Clint’s put off his scent. “I want to talk to Tony. Sounds like he’s had a rough Christmas.”

Clint should argue the hell out of Banner going back to the States. Instead he says, “Want me nearby?”

“You’ll be anyway,” Bruce says, like it’s inevitable as the law of gravity.

Clint doesn’t argue with that.

\--

Bruce has become quite the criminal mastermind. He swaps some no-questions-asked medical care and supplies for some space on a cargo ship. And Clint is all-too-familiar with ways to slip past border agents. They spend three days in the California sun before leaving again.

“You said you fell asleep?” Clint asks, incredulous at Bruce’s recitation of Tony’s story while they’re crammed in tiny bunks, on their way back to Bumfuck, Wherethehellever.

“Say I hang on to every word while Tony spills his guts,” Bruce says. “Then every time he sees me, he knows I know. Now I know, but I don’t _know_. Tony just needed an ear.”

“Your ear,” Clint prompts.

“He doesn’t want to get into the ugly stuff with Pepper right now. She had it nearly as bad.”

“You’re a good man, Banner.”

For once, Bruce doesn’t flinch at the praise. Clint _knows_ what Bruce is talking about. Natasha has done that to him, him to her. Talking about the most harrowing things even in a hail of bullets, or while dead on their feet from fatigue, or while one of them is strapped to a table with the mother of all concussions.

Sometimes that’s all you can stand. And all you really need.

“You want to talk?” Bruce says suddenly.

“Do you?” Clint asks.

Bruce shakes his head. “I dealt with mine a long time ago.” He relaxes against the wall, and a faint green tinge flows over him, making him swell in his clothes, then subsides like the tide. “We’ve come to an understanding.”

Clint just raises an eyebrow.

“I’m big enough to take it,” Bruce says. He sounds calm. Serene. Clint could use some of that inside himself.

He talks until they dock. He’s able to sleep quiet at least one night a week.

\--

Thor’s worlds nearly eat London almost a year later.

This time Clint and Bruce are just annoyed.

“We need better alerts. This sitting on my hands shit because we’re at least twelve hours away is getting old,” Clint grouses. He would have liked to have seen the big, blond lug, and maybe shoot a few of his enemies for him. Communication would be nice. Communication would be awesome. No one’s even tried to get ahold of Clint since they dumped him off in Kenya.

Instead he and Bruce complain about their superhero pals over tea in Turkey, and stay out of sight this time. Two attacks of that magnitude in less than two years means more than just some coincidence. Someone kept Steve and Natasha busy, away from helping Tony. No one tried to get to Thor. There are people moving in the shadows.

Clint burrows them deeper. 

\--

When there’s a shootout on the streets of D.C., when someone puts a gun to Cap’s head on TV and SHIELD falls, Bruce and Clint are in India. They bug out for the remotest region of Tibet they can find within a day. 

Clint blesses Nick Fury’s ghost that he was shoved out of SHIELD and exiled without a forwarding address. Blesses his name for seeing the growing danger of HYDRA and getting at least two of the Avengers free and clear of the sickness that had been rotting SHIELD from within. Everyone’s scattered, gone, but Clint’s intact and Bruce is safe. There are no location records from Natasha’s info-dump for anyone to _find_. They’re safe, safe as Fury’s paranoia could make them.

Clint would have to find a way to send out a message, to help those who were left. And they could do it. The best shot was one you never saw coming.

And Fury still has two good arrows in his quiver.


End file.
